Jeff Winger had a plan. He'd had several plans, over the course of his life. The first plan was to go to college and law school and become a divorce attorney who could watch, impassively, as marriages disintegrated and children felt abandoned, and then get in his car and leave. This plan fell through his sophomore year at college, when it turned out that the tools he'd relied on to get him through high school — a ready smile and an understanding of what made people tick — were less applicable than skills he didn't have, like memorizing and retaining facts.
The second plan still had 'divorce attorney' as its aim, but involved a few websites, a diploma-replacement service, and an online university. Jeff picked one based in Bogota, so he could tell people his degree was from Colombia and if they assumed he'd meant Columbia, that was their fault. The second plan worked well for several years; actually being a divorce attorney involved a lot more smiling and understanding people and a lot less fact-memorizing than school had. But eventually one of the assholes at his firm ratted him out to the court, probably because Jeff was going to make partner before them.
He'd managed, though. Jeff had concocted his third plan on the spot, during a disciplinary hearing before the state supreme court, when one of the 'actual' lawyers described his fraud in exhaustive detail and asked him what, exactly, he proposed to do to make it right. Ready smile, understanding people, and thinking quickly: these were the tools he used to convince the court that his crime was not unforgivable, and that he didn't even need law school, what with his successful career. No, what he really needed to demonstrate his academic capability and be a lawyer again was a bachelor's degree from an actual, accredited institution. Any institution.
Step one: suffer through four years of inane distribution requirements, using smiles and understanding when possible and quick thinking when necessary. Jeff figured that wouldn't be too hard; Greendale was a joke, academically. Most of the professors wouldn't be any more interested in teaching than he was in learning, and the ones who were he could plan around. And since he wasn't out to impress anyone, just to fulfill the requirements and get back to his job at the firm, he only needed the bare minimums: a 2.0 GPA and a major in General Studies. That was step two: graduate with a BA in nothing in particular and a 2.0 GPA, in four years. Step three: a celebratory steak dinner for one. Step four: go back to Hamish, Hamish & Hamlin like nothing had happened.
That was the plan, and it was a good plan. Four years, head down, doing the time. He wouldn't even have to learn anyone's name.
Halfway through the first day he hit a snag, in the form of a distractingly pretty girl. Normally Jeff wasn't distracted by pretty girls — he was a grown man, after all, not a moony hormonal teenager. This one was different, though; she was almost offensively pretty. During the Spanish teacher's quasi-coherent reading of his course syllabus, Jeff found his gaze drifting to the back of her head. Even the back of her head was gratingly pretty.
It wasn't even sexual, not really. It was more like she was a living Jackson Pollock painting. He could imagine himself sitting in an art gallery, staring at her profile for hours. Jeff found this unexpected distraction irritating in the extreme. He'd barely gotten through half a day of his four-year plan and already he was sidetracked. After class he approached an Arabic guy whom he'd seen talking to her before class started.
"Excuse me, buddy," he said, "you know the time?"
The Arabic guy straightened visibly, then turned and fixed Jeff with a very intense stare, disconcertingly similar to the way Jeff suspected he'd been staring at the distracting girl. "Yes, thank you," the guy said, nodding.
Jeff and the guy stood there, looking at each other for about a half-second before Jeff cracked. "What time is it?"
"My name is Abed," he responded, as though this were an appropriate answer to the question. "We're both in Señor Chang's Spanish class."
Abed was proving to be more trouble than he was worth. "Great, thanks," Jeff said. He started to turn away, in the direction he was reasonably certain the pretty girl had gone.
"I'm sorry," Abed said behind him, and something in the guy's tone made Jeff pause and turn back around. "I was trying to be funny, when I didn't answer your question. I thought we might have some fun back-and-forth and maybe become unlikely friends, if I got the ball rolling."
"It's okay," Jeff said, taken aback by Abed's bluntness. "My name's Jeff."
"Hi, Jeff," said Abed. "It's five after twelve."
Jeff decided to try one more time. "What's the deal with the hot girl from Spanish class? I saw you talking to her. Brunette, yay tall?" He gestured to about the level of his bicep.
The guy — Abed — shrugged. "Well, I only talked to her once while she was lending me a pencil, but her name is Annie, she's 28, her birthday is in December, her parents live in town but she hasn't spoken to them in a decade, and she's getting her life back on track after kind of dropping out of everything at the end of high school. Oh, and she gets really focused during classes, or she used to, and she's trying to build good habits, so she can't waste time talking to me, and she's sorry she didn't mean waste, that came out wrong."
"Holy crap," Jeff said, impressed. "Thanks, Abed."
"Not a problem," said Abed, blinking at Jeff in an oddly intent fashion. The day before Jeff wouldn't have thought 'intent' was an adjective that could be applied to the act of blinking, but the day before he hadn't met Abed. "Want to form an unlikely friendship?"
"Sure," Jeff said absently. He'd just spotted the brunette — Annie — crossing the quad and heading towards the cafeteria. In Jeff's mind he was already moving on to the next stage of his latest plan, which was just like his previous plan, except it incorporated sleeping with her as soon as possible. Historically, sleeping with a woman was the best way Jeff knew of to kill his interest in her, and he'd barely heard a word of the syllabus rant. It was a small alteration and one that he was confident he could achieve with minimal fuss. Jeff patted Abed on the shoulder and followed Annie into the cafeteria.
She was already at the front of the lunch line, paying. Jeff got in the back of the line and tried not to stare at her, while also trying to figure out what about her was so damn compelling. Flawless skin, fine bone structure, incredible hair? Those were a dime a dozen; he'd seen women like her every day back when he'd been a lawyer. He'd see women like her every day again, once he'd completed his plan. Probably it was because of the environment. Everyone at Greendale, students and staff and faculty alike, had a sort of weary depressive wearing-the-same-socks-as-yesterday vibe, like the school was a magnet for people who'd given up on life.
Annie didn't look like she'd given up on life, though. She stood out like a sunbeam cutting through fog.
But, Jeff thought, rolling over Abed's words in his mind, she had self-destructive habits and she hated her parents. She was just the type to enjoy a no-strings one-off, which meant she was Jeff's type.
By the time Jeff had his lunch, she was sitting alone at a booth, eating a sandwich with one hand and wielding a highlighter in the other. A Spanish textbook was open in front of her.
"Hey, Spanish, right?" Jeff asked, strolling up all casual-like.
"No thank you," she said without looking up.
"Huh?"
"Whatever you were going to offer me. No thank you." She glanced up then. They made eye contact for a fraction of a second, and then she was back in her book.
"I wasn't going to…" Jeff grinned as disarmingly as he knew how, which was extremely disarmingly. The effect was somewhat impaired by her failure to look up. "I just wanted to say, I saw you in Spanish class…"
She nodded, still not looking up, dammit.
Jeff felt his window of opportunity closing. "And I thought you might be interested in my Spanish study group, that I'm putting together."
That got her looking up, a perplexed expression on her face. "You spent the class playing with your phone," she pointed out.
"Yes, but… wait," Jeff said, "how did you see that? You were in the front row. Were you sneakily checking me out?"
Annie's cheeks turned slightly pinker. "You're putting together a study group?" she asked, ignoring his question.
"I'm just taking the class for an easy credit," he said through his smirk. "I'm actually a Spanish tutor — board-certified."
She scoffed. "What kind of board certifies Spanish tutors?"
"The best kind of board," he said smoothly.
Annie gave a little half-laugh, and shook her head, looking back down. "I think I'm good, thanks."
"I'm sure," Jeff said quickly. "You seem like a good student. Quick learner. Not like most of the study group. Although, you know, they say the best way to really learn something is to teach it to someone else."
She hummed.
"The group meets in Study Room F at four," he said, naming a time and place at random. "Can I count on you?"
"I wouldn't." Annie was still intent on her book, or pretending to be. But she was smiling, and maybe she wasn't making eye contact with him for a different reason.
The hook was baited; now all he needed to do was wait. His schedule, and the plan, would keep him busy in the meantime. After lunch Jeff was signed up for five different classes in the same time slot. Greendale had hilariously lax add/drop requirements, both academically and for billing purposes. Jeff intended to attend each of the five classes once and keep the one that seemed easiest. With any luck he'd breeze through four years in this fashion without having to learn basically anything.
First up was Chemistry! Jeff wasn't excited about it; Chemistry!, with an exclamation point, was the name of the class. He spent the period screwing around with his phone, calm and relaxed and definitely not anxious about any aspect of community college.
Finally four o'clock rolled around. Late enough she'd probably be done with classes. Studying turned to drinks turned to dinner turned to back to his place. Easy as pie. And if she didn't show up, hey, it wasn't a big deal.
It wasn't a big deal.
Still, four o'clock and there she was. He gave a calm little wave when she stuck her head in the study room. She wore a very flattering sundress and a nervous smile that suggested she knew what he was up to. "Here you are," she said as she sat down at the table next to him.
"Yes! Welcome." Jeff made a little show of setting down his phone and stretching.
Annie, in turn, made a little show of looking around the study room. "Am I early, or…?"
He shrugged. "You're the first to arrive. The others should be here shortly." Or they would if there were any others, which there weren't.
She nodded. "I'm sure they will be."
"So, first thing, if I can get your info on the contact sheet here…?" Jeff slid the sheet towards her. He'd had the forethought to label three columns, NAME and EMAIL and PHONE, and include his own information in the first row, just to sell it.
"Before everyone gets here," Annie said as she wrote down her email address, "we should go over the lesson plan and make sure we're on the same page."
"Sure," Jeff said. He had no intention of doing that. "But, you know, I want to hear a little bit about who I'm studying with — tell me about yourself."
She smiled bashfully. "Oh, there's not much to tell."
"Come on." Jeff leaned back and looked at her. "How'd you end up here?"
Annie seemed to consider it for a second. "All right. I, um…" She swallowed. "I had some problems my senior year of high school and I didn't go to college. Instead I… there were a lot of things. I ended up in Seattle for the WTO protests in '99. Then Greenpeace for a while. I wanted to join the Peace Corps, but that didn't work out. The last two years I was on an organic farm commune, mostly because it let me save money, partly for other reasons…"
"Sure." Jeff nodded, his display of interest more sincere than he'd expected. Partly it was her shy confidence. Partly it was just her tone of voice: Annie made organic farm commune sound erotic.
"Then I decided it was time to get back on track. I left… the farm," she continued, her eyes darting away from him in a manner that strongly implied she'd nearly ended that sentence differently. "I don't have the money to take classes anywhere but here, and when I realized I don't want to be a hippie…" She trailed off with a shrug.
"Nobody wants to be a hippie," Jeff declared. "It's basically being homeless, but with better PR."
Annie shrugged. "Don't get me wrong, hippies are great people. But they don't plan for tomorrow, or think much about long-term sustainability, or really much of anything besides getting wasted and screwing. Getting wasted and screwing is fun up to a point, but only up to a point, you know?"
Jeff tried not to grin like an idiot. Hearing this woman declare screwing is fun was like catnip to him. "Absolutely getting wasted and screwing is fun. Up to a point," he agreed, forcing himself to sound relatively sober. "There's a time and a place for everything."
"Exactly. Like, right now, we're going to study Spanish," Annie said brightly. "As soon as people get here."
"I don't know," Jeff said with exaggerated chagrin, "they may just be flaking out on us. Hippie style."
"Mmm. Maybe they're running late." She glanced at the open door of the study room, then drummed her fingers briefly on the table. "In the meantime, let me turn it around on you — why are you at Greendale?"
"Isn't it enough that I'm not teasing you about living on a pot farm for years?" Jeff asked. Seeing her expression he quickly moved on. If he couldn't dodge the question entirely, he could at least put the best face available on it. "I'm actually a lawyer."
"You're a lawyer and a Spanish tutor?" Annie asked. She sounded less intrigued and more suspicious.
Jeff chuckled, to stall for a second. "Mostly a lawyer," he said. "On the side I volunteer. Help immigrants."
She cocked her head. "You help immigrants… learn Spanish?" It might have been wishful thinking but he thought she sounded more playful than she had a moment earlier.
Jeff grinned. "Yes…?"
Annie was smiling back, and about to say something clever, and then Jeff would respond and they'd keep talking for a bit and then he'd suggest drinks, then dinner, then his place, and already he was considering how they might repeat that with variations a couple more times if she was game, not more than a couple times, nothing crazy, he was here to keep his head down, 2.0 GPA… Her phone, next to her notebook on the table in front of her, buzzed suddenly, and they both started at the unexpected sound.
"Oh," she said, examining it. Her smile had turned slightly wistful. "The others are coming."
Jeff's grin faded. "What?"
"See, I figured you were making up the Spanish tutor thing, and this was your way of asking me out," Annie said, looking away from him. "But then I was thinking about what you said, about the best way to learn being to teach others, and…" She shrugged. "Here they are now," she added with a glance over his shoulder.
Jeff turned to the door, and saw Abed standing there.
"Hello, Annie," said Abed. "Five after four, like you said."
"Hello Abed," Annie replied. "Come on, sit down. The more the merrier, right?"
Abed nodded. He seemed about to move into the room when he stopped, still blocking the doorway. "There's a weird tension here. Jeff's expression keeps changing. Is something wrong? Were you about to make out? Am I interrupting?"
Jeff's mouth had suddenly gone dry. "I…"
"You're not interrupting. We were not about to make out," Annie assured Abed. "At least not right now," she added under her breath, casting a glance Jeff's way.
Abed nodded again, and sat down next to Annie. She passed him the signup sheet.
Jeff frantically tried to come up with a pretext for getting Abed alone so he could explain that yes he was interrupting something, or better yet getting Annie alone and convincing her to blow off Abed and Spanish and skip ahead to the making-out part they both seemed pretty enthused about. Thinking quickly and understanding people, these were his weapons. It didn't seem fair that they would fail him so suddenly. "Yeah, so the thing about that is —"
He broke off as his phone started buzzing on the study room table in front of him. "Oh, jeez, would you look at — I really need to take this, one minute. Back real soon!" Jeff scooped up his phone and dashed out into the hall before Annie could say anything.
The phone call turned out to be Ian Duncan, his more-or-less friend on the faculty, wanting Jeff's schedule so he could work out who to bribe for exam keys and it was a whole lot of nothing is what it was, Jeff had much bigger fish to fry (Annie, head, 2.0, lawyer. No, that sounded distractingly pornographic and the whole point was to eliminate distractions. Annie, down, 2.0, lawyer. Not much better).
When he came back from a drink of water, a series of stretches, and a pep talk into the mirror in the men's room, Jeff was ready to handle Abed. Handle Abed, sleep with Annie, keep his head down, 2.0 GPA, become a lawyer again. That was the plan and it was a solid plan. Annie, 2.0, lawyer.
Unfortunately there was a snag, in the form of four more people Annie or Abed had invited. At a glance they seemed eminently forgettable, a collection of stock types: befuddled retiree, despondent housewife, aimless stoner, optimistic jock. But, after he had spent a couple of minutes listening to them bicker about Spanish and the learning of Spanish and whether they were Jeff's study group or Annie's study group or what, Jeff found that they were not only forgettable, but downright discomfiting.
Two of them were inarguably age-appropriate for an introductory undergraduate Spanish class. The blonde girl with the dreadlocks and the half-lidded expression of someone for whom 4:20 came early and often — Britta something — had a braying laugh that she deployed whenever the self-consciously uncaring jock — Troy something — opened his mouth. They clearly knew each other, though Jeff couldn't tell whether they were a couple, or whether Britta was just really into Troy. Troy was either an oblivious crush-object or an oddly neglectful boyfriend.
Annie didn't care for Britta, Jeff noticed noticed as he sat down between them. Clearly she'd invited Troy to the group and Britta had just followed along. Why Annie shot Britta arch look after arch look, he couldn't immediately discern. Maybe it was something to do with the time Annie had spent among hippies on a pot farm… in any case, it was something Jeff could use, perhaps, to get Annie out of here and into his bed.
The other two students, who'd somehow ended up between Britta and Troy, didn't seem to know one another, or anyone else at the table. Jeff wondered how Annie had selected them. Shirley Bennett was a slightly familiar woman who looked a few years older than Jeff, heavyset and world-weary in a way that screamed divorcee and money troubles and kids. Business degree, Jeff guessed. And the white guy, Pierce, looked to be a retiree. Probably just circling the drain, killing time until death. His wristwatch was a Rolex, which Jeff would have assumed signaled having better things to do than learn Spanish from a crazy man, but here he was.
Troy was telling a shaggy-dog story about some kind of spirit-week event at their high school wherein Troy and the rest of the football team had worn dresses to classes for a week. "And then, on Thursday, we all wore matching red skirts," he continued.
Britta guffawed. "Red skirts!"
"Yeah, red skirts," Troy repeated, glancing at her.
"You're so funny, Troy," Britta said, still snorting with laughter.
"Uh, thanks." Troy watched Britta giggle as though unsure whether they'd met before.
"So Britta, you and Troy went to the same high school," Annie declared. Her arms were folded and her face free from all expression.
"Heh, heh, yeah." Britta nodded as she sighed happily. "Riverside —"
"You went to my school?" Troy asked, surprised.
"Uh, yeah," Britta replied, rolling her eyes. "You remember me!"
"Uh…"
"You remember! Last April? Marty Tern's house party?" Britta stretched and tossed her hair. "We got high and made out in the man-cave?"
Pierce coughed. "I'm sorry, did she say man-cave?" He chuckled.
Everyone ignored him.
Troy's brow was furrowed as he tried to remember. "Uhhhhh…."
"Britta Perry!" the blonde cried.
"Britta! Right! Wow!" said Troy. Jeff was almost certain that he wasn't her neglectful boyfriend. "What are you doing here?"
"Learning Spanish, same as you!" Britta said with an enthusiasm that dwarfed the rest of the study group's combined. "I mean, my lame parents were like, 'if you're going to stay here you need to get a job or go to school,' so…" She shrugged.
Shirley hummed disapprovingly. "I'll bet."
"Okay, great," said Jeff. He clapped his hands together, because the sooner the actual studying started the sooner it ended and the sooner he could get back to Annie, 2.0, lawyer. "Who wants to take the lead on this study session?" He turned expectantly to Annie.
"What?" She looked expectantly back at him. "You claimed to be a tutor. Tute, already. Demonstrate your tutoring prowess."
The challenge in her eyes was so intense — show me why you deserve my attention — that Jeff found himself nodding. "Yo no soy una bebida pequeña," he said to the group. Random Spanish-sounding syllables.
"What?" Shirley asked.
"I am a fluent speaker of Spanish," Jeff translated. "You can call me Jeff, or, par español, el Hefe. Mi nombre es altavoz de nabo cabeza."
Next to him, Annie let out an almost inaudible squeak of laughter.
"Bienvenidos a la casa de los limones," Jeff concluded. "And I think we all know what that means."
"Something about lemons," Troy guessed.
"Casa means house," offered Shirley.
"We should probably start by looking at the first chapter in the textbook," Annie suggested. "Not that I want to tell el Hefe how to do his job."
"Does the first chapter have a lemon house?" asked Abed, interested. He and the others began to leaf through their textbooks.
"Well, el Hefe?" Annie asked him, eyes down on the text in front of her.
Sensing he was losing her, Jeff went with his gut. Annie didn't seem to like Britta, Britta liked Troy. "Troy," he said, "why don't you tell us how you know Britta, since you two are the only ones here who know each other, and then we'll take that story and translate it into Spanish?"
"Ooh, good idea," said Britta, sitting up in her seat.
Troy chuckled nervously. "I don't know, man, we're still on the first section of the first chapter…"
"So, 'hello,' " Jeff said, nodding. "And 'my name is,' and, you know. Just a simple little dialogue."
"There wasn't a lot of dialogue at the time," Britta said, batting her eyelashes — literally batting her eyelashes! — at Troy.
"Okay, dial it back," Shirley told Britta.
"What?" Britta asked, affronted.
"None of us want to hear about any damn horny teenagers —"
"You don't speak for everyone!" Pierce interrupted.
Jeff waited a few more seconds, until Troy, Britta, Pierce, and Shirley were all four involved in a multi-threaded argument about safe sex, freedom of speech, Christianity's applicability in the modern world, and Colorado drug policy. Then he quietly scooted his chair back and snuck out.
He stopped when he reached the hallway beyond, took a breath, and counted silently. Six… seven… eight…
"Where are you going?" Annie carefully closed the door behind her. She trained her big eyes on him.
Jeff sighed. In the moment his intent had been to reverse the events of the last few minutes using unknown magic, which wasn't a workable plan, he was forced to admit. "I can't tutor those people," he said. "I mean, listen to them."
He and Annie eyed the closed door to the study room. Distant shouting could be heard through it — something about Obama and Michael Jackson.
"Mmm." Annie gave a sympathetic hum. "Plus you don't speak Spanish."
Jeff's shoulders sagged in relief. "I already used all the Spanish I know."
"More Spanish than you know," she corrected, smiling.
"More Spanish than I know." Jeff grimaced, then brightened when he saw the wry look in her eyes. "You want to just call this whole experience off, start over again? I know a place that does this new thing where they sell drinks with, get this, alcohol in them…?" he offered, with a hopeful lilt.
"I knew you weren't really a tutor," Annie said, shaking her head as her smile faded. "But I'm disappointed you're quitting."
"It's hard!" cried Jeff. He wasn't exactly happy to have let her down — it put a real kink in his Annie, head down, 2.0 GPA, lawyer plan.
"You just quit as soon as it gets hard?" She sounded resigned then, surprise giving way to a settled disappointment she seemed to find familiar.
"Yes. No. Ugh. Do you have to keep looking at me like that?"
"Like what?"
"Like you think that just by looking at me like that, you can make me want to… you don't even know me, so…" Jeff took a breath. "Watch this."
He stepped past her and opened the study room door. The faint sounds of argument suddenly grew louder.
"—and anyone who says otherwise is the real racist!"
"I'll show your ass the real racist!"
"People!" Jeff yelled. "People, please." He held up his hands and successfully commanded silence. "What exactly is the problem?"
Britta spoke first. "This hypocrite," she crooked a thumb towards Shirley, "has the audacity to call me a sinner!"
"We're all sinners," Shirley retorted with a disdainful sniff. "You're just being crass."
"Okay," said Jeff. He took a breath. "Realistically, people screw. Also, people aspire to virtue. So you're both stupid, and you're both also right. We're all stupid and right. That's what binds us together as fallible humans who continuously strive to better ourselves and get laid."
"I once slept with Eartha Kitt," Pierce called out.
"See?" Jeff said, pointing at him. "We're insecure. We're all insecure. We make up transparent lies about Eartha Kitt —"
"It's not a lie! It was 1965, and for my twenty-first birthday I went to Frisco—"
"Eartha Kitt was thirty-eight in 1965," Abed said. "You'd just turned twenty-one?"
"Not relevant," Jeff said, before the derailment could proceed further. "None of us are here because of great choices —"
"Speak for yourself," muttered Britta. Pierce tried to high-five her, but she shook her head no.
"I'm going to back up and start again," Jeff said. "We're all fallible, we all strive, yadda yadda, glass houses, stones, let's study España."
"Español," supplied Annie from the doorway behind him.
"Exactly." Jeff nodded, as though his point was made. Most of his courtroom delivery was predicated on the notion that tone and cadence mattered much more to swaying juries' opinions than the specific words he said.
There was a long pause.
"Well, I'm in," said Shirley. "I mean, that was stupid, but I've completely forgotten what we were arguing about."
"Me too!" said Britta cheerily.
Abed bobbed his head. "Let's bond over an unexpected shared interest!" he suggested to Troy.
"All right man, sure. You like football?"
Abed shook his head. "No."
Troy tried again. "Basketball?"
"No."
"Golf?"
"No."
"Movies?"
"Yes!" Abed nodded happily.
"I like movies too!" cried Pierce. He and Abed high-fived.
Jeff sat back down at the study room table. "Wow," he said quietly as Annie sat down next to him. "I'm kind of surprised that worked."
Annie shrugged. "People surprise you. Now, let's study. I might have a date later." She gave Jeff a sidelong smile.
Jeff tried not to grin as he opened his Spanish textbook. He had a simple plan. Annie, 2.0, lawyer. Annie, 2.0, lawyer.
Annie. That was the plan, and it was a good plan.